2015-02-27T17:27:06ZCopyright (c) 2015, Dave SnowdenExpressionEnginetag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:02:25Light weight and then plain wrongtag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64652015-02-25T09:01:00Z2015-02-27T09:27:06ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
Juse to be clear, the opening picture is not intended to represent the human brain. Now in my wildest dreams I would not have believed it possible for anyone to assert it did, but that nightmare was realised today. Having delivered a workshop on knowledge mapping yesterday I had the day to catch up on email and also to tune into the conference before speaking first thing tomorow. I decided to go to the opening keynote by an Australian speaker which advertised itself as providing insight into the use of design thinking in intranet design. In practice all it turned out to be was a parade of web sites that had won awards, supposedly to inspire us to greater things. Now I can look at award winning sites on the web, I don't need to attend a reading aloud story session. If I put the time in to hear a speaker I expect to know more about how it is done as well as the odd why; but nothing was offered beyond a Ladybird Guide to the Intranet.

I wasn't the only one dissapointed. The first question was to ask where design thinking had come in and the questioner was fobbed off. So I asked it again but more directly and was told I had asked a good question. Now I tried that trick on an Austraian a decade or more ago and got the fast response: I didn't ask you to rate my question you pommie bastard, I asked you to answer it. I've been waiting to use it on an Australian ever since so I did. Again I got nothing aside from a remarkably juvenile comment that he was sure they used a lot of hexies. He also suggested that anyone could learn about design thinking by searching on the web and he was sure the sites he had presented had used some aspects of it. Now I think that means he had no idea about the subject, something compounded by the fact that he had nothing to do with any of the sites, nor had he done any research as to how they had been produced.

His crowning folly was to tell people there was no excuse not to build a low cost intranet because a school had one one. Well give me a bunch of tech savvy 16 year olds giving their time for free and I am pretty sure I could get a good outcome. However he knew nothing of the ethics of doing that in a school and since when are there hoards for free 16 years olds avaible for corporate IT developments? Not only theory lite, but practice lite as well.

All of that put me in a bad mood but I didn't imagine it could get aan worse, but it did in a suibsequent track session. The presentation claimed to have the perfect Intranet architecture, designed by someone two years out of the army (as it turned out). This bright spark claimed that humans do not like ambiguity as their brains are organised like a card index system in a library and anything else causes them stress. I left him alone as it was pretty obvious that he was being autobigraphical and didn't realised that the rest of the world might be different. I felt a little sorry as well, it was a track session and he was not used to speaking. No such sympathy for the opening keynote however. At least I am now fully prpeared for tomorrow morning when I get to speak.

]]>Oppenheimertag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64642015-02-24T14:31:00Z2015-02-27T08:07:52ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
I'm taking a break from my series of posts on the new culture scan, in part because I need to do some more work on the documentation over the next few days and a couple of long haul flights will allow me reflective time to complete that task. The schedule is pretty fraught with my having arriived in Copenhagen earlier today to deliver a workshop, followed by a presentation Thursday then a flight to New Zealand with a 12 hours stop over in Singapore before returning via Los Angeles the following weekend in the first Round the World trip of the year.

This trip is bracked by trips to the theatre, last night to Oppenheimer at the RSC in Stratford with my wife, and the day I return from New Zealand to see Stoppard's new philosophy play The Hard Problem at the South Bank with wife and daughter. The only slot to see oppenheimer was last night which resulted in a fraught trip to Heathrow this morning. I got home just after midnight, packed and then after three hours sleep headed for the airport realising half way there that I had left my MacBook at home. No time to go back and I only made the plane with seconds to spare as it was so I will have to survive on the iPad for two weeks.

But oh was it worth it. The play is more or less sold out in Stratford but I imagine it will come to London. IThe RSC itself guarantees you good acting, a stable that has fed the film industry of the years, but even by their standards this was exceptional. It was also in the Swan which is my favourite theatre in Stratford. I must confess I had not been aware of the degree to which Oppenheim and the other physists around him were linked to the American Communist Party around the Spanish Civil War, nor was I aware of the personal tragedies which accompanied the Manhatten project. The play manages to play the personal along with the growing threat of facism and the growth of the McCarthy era well, along with the destruction of the idealism of youth and a whole host of other themes. If you get a chance, get a ticket.

]]>Narratives of Culture: 1st movementtag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64632015-02-23T06:27:00Z2015-02-27T07:35:00ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
One of the problems with cultural surveys in organiations is that they tend to be evaluative in nature. The same issue applies to 360 feedback, employee satisfaction survenys and the like. With the best of intentions they want to know what people think about the organisation. The problem is that evaluation closes down options and also can create stress or gaming behaviour.

In addition the process of evaluation is itself problematic as it focuses people on a single act of judgement with a singple focus. That moves away from the day to day micro narratives that describe the total experience of the respondent. We do't live our lives in neat silos of hyothesis based surveys; we live the day to day experiences of social encounters, infused with multiple experiences, hopes and dreams that are not directly engaged with work, but which we cannot leave at the security card swipe in of the modern workplace.

In an ideal world we would scan continuously and incidentally using day to day experiences to create a contimnuous pulse. Now that is something we can offer with SenseMaker, but that isn't an entry level offering. With the new Scan you can start with the whole workforce or take a sample every week or month. That should give enough confidence to move on to something closer to a full continuous real time feedback loop.

Critically with the Scan, no employee is asked to evaluate the organisation, instead they simply tell a story, take a picture, interview another staff memner or any combination thereof. Signification is then carried out on a series of balanced triads which have all positive labels, and the labels are themselves descriptive. As I pointed out in my second post in this series, its all about seeing emerging patterns rather than some absolute measure.

So in the next series of posts I'll run through those signifiers. I may take a break for a couple of days but I will have them complete by the end of the week.

]]>Narratives of culture: the scoretag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64612015-02-22T02:48:00Z2015-02-22T11:36:31ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
This is going to be a little out of sequence, but I want to come to how we gather narrative for the new culture scans in future posts. Suffice it to say for the moment that this uses SenseMaker® and a non-hypothesis question that can be asked of the whole workforce or just a sample: What story would you tell your best friend if they were thinking of joining your workgroup? The employee then interprets that story using a series of signifiers that provide quantitive data, but at any stage we can look at the stories from which the numbers are derived. I'll be going through the signifiers and their background in subsequent posts.

So suspend any curiosity about the how for the moment and lets look at some of the ways we can use the data to manage the evolutionary potential of the present rather than trying to engineer to some desired future state. Now we can do this in several ways, but I want to run through two options today.

Basic, on the iPad in the standard service

The simplest is to look at the pattern revealed by the overall positioning of the narratives on one of the signifiers. I've shown one in the opening picture and it illustrates the basic principle of signification in SenseMaker® namely something that it difficult to game (unlike a conventional linear scale) with three positive qualities; more on that tomorrow. In this case we can see that the overall orientation of the organisation is towards analytical decision making, there is little in the intuitive space and some orientation towards principled decision making.

That means the organisation may have an issue if the pace of change in their sector does not allow for full analysis, or if ethics compete with numbers then there might be an issue. These are indications of plausible futures not predictions of probable ones, an important distinction. The HR department can then use SenseMaker® on an iPad to look at the underlying micro-narratives and ask themselves ​What can we do that would result in more stories like these, fewer like those.

More advanced, additional service with monitoring capability

For more sophisticated programmes we start to look at landscapes such as the one shown here. The dimensions come from the signification, but instead of a dot plot here we have a landscape, capable of handling huge volumes of data with boolean combinations of signifier values. In this case the vertical dimension is compliance with rules and process, the horizontal getting the job done.

The general goal of the organisation is to have stories in the top right and there are some. However there are two dominant negative ones: one is the polar opposite, the other getting the job done and ignoring the rules. A very common position (this plot is from a live project by the way. The leap to the top right is probably a step too far, but would be the normal focus of change programmes. But in this case we can see a small cluster in the saddle point to which the arrows point. If we could shift both the negative clusters in that direction then it would make a significant difference and is an easier shift. Of course when we get there we might decide to move in a different direction.

So to make the shift we first look at the stories in the bottom right cluster and ask: What is it about our rules that are resulting in this behaviour? Of course it may be that all of our employees are a bunch of no hopers bit that cluster probably indicates an over focus on rules that prevent customer service (I can give lots of IBM examples) where employees are finding work arounds. We then click on the saddle point and ask What are we doing (or not doing) that makes stories like these possible? Those two simple questions radically transform the way we change culture.

Having settled on a series of actions I would then monitor change - the great thing about this approach is that it is a continuous real time feedback, it does not require ​yet another survey.

... to be continued

PS: the title of "the score" is intended to make the point that even with a score there are multiple possible intepretations both for the conductor and the musicians.

]]>Narratives of culture: overturetag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64602015-02-20T23:52:00Z2015-02-22T08:38:16ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
There are some basic truths about culture in organisations that are pretty self-evident to anyone prepared to engage with either theory or practice. The first and most basic of those is that you can't engineer it or for that matter define it as a set of desirable qualities, values or any other loose collection of platitudes. In many ways the cultural engineering approaches that typify many a consultancy method have simply responded to the wider engineering metaphor that requires pre-defined outcomes. In practice movements and ideas have a habit of seeping up people, practice and principles with little regard for evidence or effectiveness. So blaming the HR function, or for that matter the consultants is both unfair and unhelpful.

However all movements have their day, and when the shift happens what matters is to seize the day and try and get a method or tool or two that have greater authenticity to the reality of cultural change, namely it is an evolutionary process that is most effectively achieved by small actions in the present. Grand visions of the future and massive engineering programmes simply drive authentic behaviour underground and enable lip service to declared values. Nothing is without some effect, but the ineffectual is often too easily disguised to satisfy the stated needs of those in power.

One of the ways to do this is to seek to understand culture as defined by the day to day stories of work and play and then by, in the main small, actions (I can't over emphasis the word) see if those stories shift or change into a more desirable form. I'm leaving aside for the moment the question of whether those in power have the right to even seek some changes as I think that question is academic in the worst sense of the word. The day to day reality is that they will and do so you either withdraw or you engage. I choose the latter.

So next week we will launch a low cost (even lower if you get in early) cultural mapping tool (possibly two) that organisations can use. The tool is designed to allow people to see the overall pattern of culture and then take small actions in the here and now and see if those achieve change. Downstream (within weeks) this will develop into a new tool for recruitment screening that moves beyond the nonsense of algorithms sorting CVs (the throw them on the stairs and see where they land is more progressive.

So for the next few days I am going to be posting on aspects of culture linked to that narrative mapping.

]]>The science of common sensetag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64592015-02-20T03:07:00Z2015-02-21T11:27:14ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
A solid day's teaching at Hull Business School today based one a set of material I have used in this type of context several times. Session one is complexity, session two the cognitive aspects (distinguishing cognitive complexity from computational approaches) and then finally SenseMaker® under the general banner of narrative research. The final session tends to use slides as I need to show narrative landscapes and entry/retrieval. But for the rest of the programme I chalk and talk; that allows far greater flexibility and you can adjust the pace to the audience.

Now with a set of masters students it is more than legitimate to push the boundaries a little. Complexity is a very new way of thinking but as I constantly point out; it is the science of common sense, a new simplicity in sense-making. That was made easier today as the majority of the participants were active managers or practitioners at the front end of practice. One ex Chief Petty Office and an Ambulance Service manager to take two examples. I find that those who face the reality of complexity in their day to day jobs get the ideas and concepts quickly. It gives a scientific explanation to things they already knew but found difficult to articulate. The more communication is mediated, the more distanced the decision maker from reality and the more problematic they find simplicity give the artifice of the complications.

]]>Lines in the sands of timetag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64582015-02-19T13:29:00Z2015-02-20T09:41:37ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
Up to Hull today to deliver my first lecture tomorrow in what I hope will be a long term relationship. Yasmin Merali has moved there from Warwick and my loyalties have moved with her, although I am still to lecture on their MBA programme this year. Yasmin is an old and loyal friend. Unlike the Prof at Surrey University she stayed with me during the dead-john-years in IBM (I may tell that story one day, but it was nasty, brutish and short) at some cost. She also introduced me to Max Boisot for which the debt is beyond my ability to pay. We were both swapping stories of the consequences of his loss earlier today. Both of us would speak to him most weeks for inspiration, advice and criticism. Either way the systems centre at Hull now has Yasmin as a full Prof and she joins another old friend there namely Gerald Midgley.

So the three of us went out to dinner last night for a long conversation. One of the issues which came up (and not for the first time) is how to create some boundaries, or lines in the sand that would allow people to distinguish both the differences and commonalities of different approaches that people generally lump under the banner of systems. I distinguish systems thinking from complexity, but I have never been happy with the labels. What we really need is a multi-dimensional typology and that was under discussion last night. So if we look at attributes or dimensions of that typology there are some clear candidates:

Causality or dispositionality?

Goal or present (not presence) orientation

Dependency on models, or differences as to what can be modelled

Experience derived theory or theory informed practice?

Power orientation in deterring goals/direction

How are constraints handled (not theory of constraints although that is in there)

Natural science v social science

Modernism/post-modernism/post-post-modernism

Focus in actors (not actor network theory) or network/interactions

I am sure there are more. Other ideas? I then plan to set up a SenseMaker® database for people to signify different methods and approaches in order to create a typology.

]]>Thinking differently for SenseMaker®tag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64572015-02-18T14:55:00Z2015-02-19T14:51:01ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
A rather novel to start to the day; discovering that the Cathedral Road B&B I am staying in is owned and managed by Charlotte Church's father. We exchange comments on dealing with wayward daughters and the loss to Welsh Rugby of Gavin Henson. This is a part of South Wales I love, the lack of pretension and the refusal to take fame seriously. I remember a long conversation about rugby with Tom Jones when I was luck enough to sit next to him on a flight back from Milan several years ago. Breakfast over it was down to Atlantic Wharf for a meeting with the CEO of Cardiff Council then back up to the SWALEC stadium to complete day two of our project to create a range of NHS related projects ranging from patient care to obesity management along with many others. I'll be back in three weeks time to finalise this, but for the moment we have a good range of projects with committed participants - all part of the Small Countries project. There is a greater intimacy in Wales around the NHS and a different attitude to its criticality than you find in the South East of England. I think its part of the tribal culture that is so much a part of celtic culture in contrast with the more atomistic and mercantile culture that grew up in and around London. But then I am biased ....

What I was really pleased about is that we managed to get a large group of people to move away from the survey mentality. I emphasised some key aspects of SenseMaker® project design and they were all on board by the end of the day; evidenced by their project definitions more than verbal compliance. Those aspects can be summarised as follows:

The whole point of scalable (or distributed) ethnography is that you scale it. Journalling and Citizen Journalism not only gather more data points but they are more authentic to the day to day experience of people that responding to a survey.

Focusing on description not evaluation opens up far more possibilities. Experts tend not only to assess data instrumentally, but design surveys on the assumption of intentionality and honesty. Both of which can be challenged. Properly used SenseMaker® allows significant numbers of fragmented descriptions to open up interventional possibilities that would be closed off or ignored by ​premature evaluation.

The signifiers in Cynefin should be derived from concepts associated with the field of study, maintaining essential ambiguity that allows people to interpret ambiguous material. Eliminating ambiguity (which tends to be the case with categories and key words) reducing description, makes meaning-making difficult.

There was a whole lot more, but those were the three essentials. Overcome those, or better still understand them in practice and things go easily Force a novel method into the structures of traditional research and you are unlikely to succeed. Then the worker blames the tools despite having used them untrained and unaware of their nature.

]]>Hireathtag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64562015-02-17T14:14:00Z2015-02-18T22:15:01ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
Down to Cardiff this morning for a two workshop which will define a series of SenseMaker® projects for the health sector. We are holding it in the SWALEC stadium which of of itself triggers memories. Glamorgan Cricket Club used to play at what is now the Arms Park and I spend many days there watching them play visiting overseas teams. I still have Wes Hall's autograph somewhere. Cardiff is a strange place for me, I regard it as home but I have only ever lived there for a few months back at the age of four. We stayed in the family house after Dad had been prevented from setting up a new Veterinary practice in Thame by what can be only described as the establishment. At that point he decided to join the Ministry and got assigned to Mold in Flintshire. My mother was born and bred in Cardiff so we stayed at the family home. I still remember her coming back having found a house and my insisting (as a earnest four year old) on walking with her to discuss the options.

Either way after that although I grew up in the North we went back to Cardiff several times a year and over the years, more so when I went to University, I increasingly regarded Cardiff as home. After University I returned more frequently, then as my children came along I started taking them to the Arms Park where I have held a season ticket for many years. With my mother's death I bought a Debenture seat for the Millennium in memorial and have not missed a home match since. The welsh word Hireath comes into play here. It represents a wistful longing for the place of your belonging (Cynefin), a need and a desire to return, to be a part of that place. Overtime I come to Cardiff I relax, I feel at home.

In many ways I grew up there. My cousin Peter was the same age as my sister, my cousin Michael much older so I was on my own a lot. I spent time searching out fossils anytime I could get an adult to take me to Penarth. Otherwise I went to the Museum and got to know the staff in the Geology section well. Curiosity and mostly adult intellectual company are formative and it isn't anything I regret. So I never ever tire of returning home.

]]>Good to have few choicestag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64552015-02-16T13:32:00Z2015-02-18T21:46:06ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
One of the interesting aspects of spending far too much time on planes is that you often see films that you would not otherwise seek out. OK it can be bad; I ended up watching the Spice Girls Move on one Qantas flight as I had exhausted all other options on two trips to Singapore and one to Australia in the same month. Ironically a few weeks later I ended up sitting next to Baby Spice in Club but didn't realise until the autograph hunters started to sneak up from economy.

Either way to get to the point! Flying out to Los Angeles last week I ended up watching Calvary with a wonderful performance by Brendan Gleeson and Chris O'Dowd. Advertised as a black comedy, it is in fact (well in my opinion) a film about redemption, a profound film that asks more questions that it even seeks to answer. Then on the way back it was Begin Again, picked if I am honest for Kieran Knightly which was a white brilliant comedy, with redemptive aspects and one of the best sound tracks. Both films had a gentle pace with a story line than unfolded in unexpected but interesting ways.

On the other channels there was the normal action diet of sensation without content or meaning, but it was keeping some people happy.

]]>Management corsetstag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64542015-02-15T10:11:00Z2015-02-16T18:26:55ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
One of the observations I have made over the years is that senior management and the coal face get complexity as a concept; mostly the problem is with middle management. Now I am not allocating blame here, it reflects the nature of the roles, and of course I am making very general statements. The real point is that people trying to direct the enterprise and people dealing with customers know about complexity on a day to day basis. So when you give them the science it legitimises what they already know. Those in middle management administer process, or manage budgets and the like. They have, over the years, been given less and less autonomy so their interests increasingly focus on risk avoidance.

I had that experience today over brunch in Mission Hills with the CEO of an organic retail chain. One look at SenseMaker® as a capture and reporting device and he immediately saw the point of fast, real time feedback. The potential for a new approach to customer panels and in store reporting did not need to be explained, he simply got it. In a similar meeting the day before with a very, very senior Executive now a major philanthropist; three minutes into a conversation he saw the potential to reduce the US prison population. Now this is a brief blog so I'm not going to expand on those specific projects. The point is really the nature of interaction with the world and the level of disintermediation. The more you restrict people's freedom and put them into roles where their survival is depending on restricting the freedom of others, the less you should expect them to be open to innovation.

Nonaka used to talk about selling middle-bottom-up. To be brutally honest I think that is up there with the SECI model in terms of bad advice. Bottom up and top down to open up the middle is more what is necessary. At the moment the corsets of middle management restrict circulation, prevent communication and damage the ability to make strategic decision making, Those with the real world problems can see the value of novel solutions. Those whose problems arise from process are too threatened.

]]>Another Drucker memorytag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64532015-02-14T05:44:00Z2015-02-16T01:53:06ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
My other vivid memory of Peter Drucker (and it still hurts) was when I naively criticised Taylorism and ended up on the receiving end of an I knew Frederick Taylor response during which I was reduced to a puddle of humiliation. The great man decided I might be redeemable, something for which I am eternally grateful and the leadership seminar I mentioned yesterday was one response. That meant I got a chance to teach complexity theory with Drucker (and I suspect that is a unique) and to talk about the relationship to other theories.

The conclusion we came to was that scientific management and complexity had much in common. While the former provided physical augmentation to human capability, automating many tasks it still at its heart respected the value of human judgement. Complexity, or at least my cognitive complexity variation also shows the same respect, arguing for cognitive augmentation. In SenseMaker® we talk about humans at the front, humans at the end which makes the same point.

Both contrast with systems thinking (in its popular forms) where the intent of many of the practices and their theory appears to be cognitive replacement. I'm increasingly convinced that there is more work to do here and I've been going back to Taylor and Deming to review that intuition. The more I read, the more I am convinced this is important. Interesting computational complexity and systems dynamics share a love of models which just adds to my argument.

]]>A memory of Peter Druckertag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64522015-02-12T17:31:00Z2015-02-16T01:39:32ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
I'm back in San Diego again for a series of meetings and if things work out I am going to spending a lot more time here. It has fond memories for me of the early Delphi group knowledge management conferences held in the Hotel Del. It was where I first met Peter Drucker and where, after one conference I got to join him and one other to deliver a leadership seminar. Teaching with Peter Drucker was a privilege to say the least and the chance for conversation a blessing. In one conversation we came to a conclusion to which I will return tomorrow but for the moment I want to remember one key insight.

I asked him over dinner one day what the role of a consultant should be. At the time I was immersed in trying to create an alternative consultancy model for IBM Global Services (yes I failed but it was interesting) so I thought I would seek assistance. What he said has stuck with me ever since. he looked across the dinner table and suggested that the role of a consultant was to be a butterfly, fertilising though transferring ideas, often imperfectly that allowed organisations to move on and development. He went on, with some passion, to say that the role was not to do the job for a company by implanting a large team.

Now a lot of the large consultancy groups reference Peter Drucker, and several are engaged with the Drucker Forum. But I don't see much observance of that particular piece of sage advice.

]]>Describe don’t evaluatetag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64512015-02-12T05:09:00Z2015-02-16T01:22:30ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
One of the things I have been emphasising for the last two days when I have been talking about SenseMaker® is the criticality of description over evaluation. The minute we evaluate, assess, judge, interpret or whatever we start to reduce what we scan. The more we can hold open a description the more we scan, the more possibility of seeing novel solutions or interesting features. In some of our work where we have compared the way experts interpret narrative as against the original signification by the research subjects we have generally found that the former is instrumentalist, the latter descriptive.

One of the key issues in any complex adaptive system is to prevent premature convergence, to avoid hypotheses, to remain open to weak signals and options. It was one of the main influences on my decision to use balanced triads in signification. By creating three positive or three negative descriptors on a triad, you prevent the respondent from having any inkling as to the desired result and the positioning on the triad means that you get diverse and interesting descriptions. It means that you get a richer range of responses when you ask the basic SenseMaker® action question: What can we do to create more stories like these and fewer stories like those.

Interpretation is also contextual, so any evaluative scale is limited in its utility over time. On the other hand high abstraction, descriptive signification means that original data maintains its value long after the original purpose is forgotten. In conventional surveys the output is the report and the raw data is abandoned. In SenseMaker® the raw data retains its utility over extended periods.

]]>Any speaker needs an audiencetag:cognitive-edge.com,2015:blog/entry/4.64502015-02-10T16:48:00Z2015-02-16T00:59:29ZDave Snowdenwww.cognitive-edge.com
Day two of recording material for Intel training and I am now into the swing of it. The material is going to be put up on the Cognitive Edge web site as well so I now have a new recoding of the Children's Party story which is 35kg less than the current one. One of the great things that Dan and Rhea have done is to give me an audience on both days. Last time round I sat on a stool and talked to the camera in an Adelaide studio. Speaking to an audience is always preferable but I didn't get the hand of doing it for the record until today. An audience even if they say nothing gives you feedback and it alters what you say and how you say it. So yesterday I got very anecdotal and specific. Today I learnt the error of my ways and made the recording sessions desecrate chunks, with more discursive sections in between. The other big difference on day two was more active questioning and that always keeps you on your toes.

I don't know if anyone has studied this, but there is some form of communication that is more than simply visual clues between a speaker and an audience. It also means you never get bored. Even familiar stories and points take on new meaning every time you present them to a new group of people. Any good presentation is of course a form of entertainment, however serious the content. So it follows that you need people to entertain.

Illustration: 'The Audience' oils on canvas painted by George Underwood